App-V 4.5 Resource Kit: Application Virtualization SFT Parser Tool

Today's blog post is a continuation of the series covering the 5 resource kit tools released recently.

As its name implies, the SFT parser tool makes it easy to inspect and extract information from SFT files. The tool would be useful for administrators who want to validate large SFT files have been copied properly before deploying. It may also help with confirming the version of application binaries included in a package without having to stream the application to a test system.

The SFT parser tools provides a command line interface which enables integration with existing scripts:

C:\MSAppVirt_SftInfo_Setup_1.0.0.15100>SftInfo.exe

SftInfo [Options...] input-file [output-file]

Options:

-? [ --help ] generate help message

-A [ --abort-on-error ] do not try to recover from a serious error in the package

The first example below uses the –V option and shows a successful validation. The second example extracts properties of the winword.exe file from an Office 2007 package. An administrator can use the creation date to easily identify the version of binaries deployed without having to stream the application.